The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to communications in a machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless wide area network (WAN). Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, sensor data, tracking data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple devices. In some examples, these devices may be sensors and/or meters configured to collect data and transmit this data to an end server via a base station. These sensors and/or meters may be referred to as M2M devices. Base stations may communicate with M2M devices on forward and reverse links. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. An M2M device may transmit data to a base station on the reverse link.
When an M2M device transmits data on the reverse link, it adds to the total interference on the reverse link. Since the reverse link transmissions might be high speed in nature, the spreading factors may be low, the coding gain may be low, and the power required by the M2M device to perform these transmissions may be high. The resulting interference might create communication problems on the reverse link. As a result, an acceptable noise and interference threshold may be set. This may represent the amount of interference that can be added to the reverse link without causing the interference to become too high to decode information received from M2M devices. Traditional approaches, however, set a single threshold for the various frequency channels of the reverse link. If the threshold is set too high, M2M devices with a larger path loss may not be able to effectively transmit communications on the reverse link. If the threshold is set to low, the capacity the frequency channels is diminished.